The Story so Far…

Here follows the tale of how the expansion project came to existence. All the people that helped and inspired the project, many without knowing, even more with knowing. Thanks to you all. I hope you enjoy reading.

How it all began

Chinese inventions

In the summer of 2011, whilst having my day off from bar tending I was once again wondering if it would be somehow possible to add a new civilization to Age of Empires II. I had my mind set on a submission from 2009 in the archives at aok.heavengames.com where a Taiwanese guy under the name of kdpp6512 submitted a guide to add a 19th civilization to the game. With limited possibilities though, only 1 extra civ was possible, no working tech tree and would only be usable in single player. On top of that the documentation came with a language barrier. He attempted to translate it into English but the screenshots of the software he used all came in Chinese. Two years went over this post and judging from the comments section nobody seemed to have figured out this “Holy Grail” of modding. But the Taiwanese dude managed to do it, so I knew it was possible. Armed with Google translate and a good portion of time to spend on trial & error, I started messing around with my newly acquired Chinese software.

By the end of the day I managed to get where he got, I had 1 extra civ. It would crash my game more than it would actually enhance it, but it was something. And for the next few weeks I spent my free moments figuring out how to improve this additional civ system.

Into China

In the meanwhile on the other side of the world, I wasn’t aware that there was also someone else working on a similar project. A guy going by the name of DJeronimo was also working on adding new civs and at that time he was a few steps ahead of me. He managed to add 5 civs but they were only usable in single player mode. And not even in the scenario editor. It still was a limitation but at least he had 5 more or less working civs, with new unique units and all. However, I only discovered his project months after I managed to fix these hazards.

Funky Bugreport #1: In the first version where the Italians appeared, their UU had 1000 armor. Needless to say my opponent (Justin, the first ever tester on AoFE) won that game

Expanding

A hard choice

It was thus possible to add new civs without crashing the game. It was still buggy, but playable. Now the hard decision came up, which civs to add? I think we all thought about this before: what civs would we add to AoE2 if we had the chance to? Many essays and long discussions in various online communities were held on this topic but none could be turned into reality so far. I still remember my first list, it consisted out of 5 civs. Why 5? It seemed like a good number and it it was also the number of civs added in The Conquerors Expansion. My first list had: Lombards, Tibetans, Incas, Magyars, Scythians. The Lombards turned into the more general name “Italians”, the Tibetans changed to the more military orientated Indians, the Incas stayed Incas and so did the Magyars. The Scythians felt too out of place and were changed to the broader and more beefed Slavs. None of these changes were decided by the flip of a coin, but came by reading through history article after article, trying to figure out which civs would fit into Age of Empires II and could bring up interesting units, tactics or story lines to our favourite virtual battlefield.

Eventually the decisions on the civs seemed to have some surprising support from the past. Apparently when making the decisions on which civs were to be added for The Conquerors, the civs that we eventually picked were all considered in the design process and were only left out in the final voting round. Magyars and Slavs lost to the Huns, Italians to the Spaniards, Indians to the Koreans and the Incas already had two brothers up north.

Funky Bugreport #2: While playing around with the unique technology for the Indians, one version came with self destructive hand cannons. If the hand cannoneer would fire a round, his weapon would explode in his face, killing him.

A long road

So far, only design and coding problems have been solved, not a single graphic was drawn, not a single tune was composed and those aren’t my strong points at all. At first I thought this wouldn’t matter too much, the modding community for AoE2 is almost as old as the game itself and it couldn’t be that hard to find some goodness in the extended archives at aok.heavengames.com. After all, they were filled with many small projects where people made a beautiful unit but these mini mods were never widely used because all players would need the mod for full use of the little gem. A project like this seemed thus the ideal opportunity to give all these mini mods a place in the spotlight they deserve. Most modders were also very helpful in sharing their graphical work, slowly turning this solo-enterprise into a community geared project.

What would they say?

But okay, so far we’ve only been dwelling around in the past. Polishing up old graphics and contacting old users to use their graphics. But what would the current community say? After all, we’ve all been playing this 10 year old game for… 10 years. If a random unknown guy would pop up “hey, let’s add new civs to the game”, what would you say? “We’ve been having fun for 10 years, the game isn’t broken and we’re having fun. Leave us alone!” Luckily it didn’t went like that. I wouldn’t talk about en enthusiastic reply either, but let’s call it “mildly approving”. Which for me was good enough to carry on.

Funky Bugreport #3: Whilst fixing the effect that chemistry has on Trebuchets, I accidentally took away their ability to destroy buildings. Leading to quite annoying and comical warfare.

Meanwhile in the AI community

Debugging AoE2

A few months before I even thought about this project, things were brewing elsewhere. A small community of AoE2, namely the AI community, started their own little project to fix the game. The original AI system was quite brilliant at its time, but as time passed, it showed some obvious shortcomings. The most familiar example being that AIs can’t hunt boars, which gives them a huge disadvantage over human players. But once you start debugging something seriously, you find many corpses in the closet. The little project soon started to grow bigger and so did their buglog. Not only AI related problems were fixed, but general features like widescreen options, windowed mode and even networking improvements were implemented. UserPatch was born.

I had the honour of meeting the guys and soon discovered we were on the same line. And after all, if you’re expanding the house, you might as well fix the leaks in the other rooms. I kept an interested eye on their progress and tried to help out with writing bug reports. Over time, all the functionality necessary to add new civs, migrated to UserPatch as well.

Bugs, bugs, bugs

Soon the community caught news of the UserPatch project and bugs started to flow in from everywhere. Many big bugs that have gone unnoticed for many years were suddenly discovered and consequentially fixed.

Funky Bugreport #4: Fervor, the upgrade to make your monks move faster, never worked in Age of Empires II, it was discovered 13 years after the release of the game. Talking about a strong placebo effect!

The first flaws

Balancing

AoE2 is a very balanced game. The game is played for over a decade and sometimes new tactics still emerge. However, in competitive games, about half of the civilizations are never picked, and some units are never to be seen. A shame, but as said earlier, when you’re building a new room in your house, you might as well fix the leaks in the others. So it was time for some expert balance testing. A first big test for the popularity of the project and the will of the community. I was very happy to sign up the first 12 testers out of about 100 applications. Beta testing could kick off and with the help of the then emerging streaming (under impulse of FeAge and DreaIVIS) we would finally have the chance to show the expansion to the rest of the community.

Resources

Another big problem that emerged was the necessity for original resources. At first we shamelessly copied resources to play around with in our new modding tools. Intro tunes were ripped from soundtracks and songs, history files were copied from various pages across the web, but as the project came to look more professional and the anticipation of the community became larger, the need for original content was simply unavoidable. And as our needs grew larger, the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place.

Funky Bugreport #5: The early Italian gates turned invisible when you opened them. Enemy units would bump their heads into an invisible wall.

Spreading the word

The Messenger

In February 2011 after releasing the first trailer, many gaming sites big and small alike caught up with the news that some fans started to work on a new expansion for AoE2. At the time of writing, the trailer has been viewed 100000 times, hopefully the amount of people that will check out the expansion

Marco Polo

Right from the start, the main focus of the project was on the occasional player. The guys that would round up with friends to play a match of AoE2 or that would have fun in completing a quest with their favourite medieval hero. As far as I was aware, the community in Belgium was nearly non-existent, but in a united Europe, one must look across the borders. Thriving communities still exist in Germany (thanks for the invite, F_aLc_enSchrei), the Czech Republic (thanks for the invite, The_Prophet) and Hungary (thanks for the invite TLW_Priby). I was happy to be invited for those events to present the project and get their feedback straight away. Unforgettable experiences for someone who loves to travel!

The team expands

The Power of AoE2

We had to expand our team drastically to meet the quality standards on music, graphics, sound effects and history. After all, we weren’t going to release the damn thing if it wasn’t better or at least of equal quality as The Conquerors Expansion. But where do you find these people and how can you get them warm for “a modding project”. This is where the power of the Age of Empires II brand comes into play. Ensemble Studios described the game as “lightning in a bottle”, and that’s pretty much the impact the game had on the lives of so many youngsters in the late 90s. And even though I can’t tell from my own experience, once you’re struck by lightning, it stays with you for a lifetime. That love so many people had for this game bubbled towards the surface again when they read about Age of Empires II: Forgotten Empires, but this time, they had the chance to help out. It was very nice to see how many people still care so much for this golden oldie!

The unexpected corner

Not only direct help emerged, elsewhere in the community things were buzzing as well. For some weird coincidence, people started to work on modding tools for AoE2. Keisari Tapsa created Advanced Genied Editor 2, the extremely powerful sequel to Scenario_t_c’s Advanced Genied Editor, which was the graphical extension of the first Genied 0.2 by Ykkrosh. Without these tools, AoFE would not have been possible.

Funky Bugreport #6: We accidentally increased the range of cavalry archers to 541, enabling them to rain terror all over the map from wherever they would shoot. Particularly funny if you target a town center, and their low accuracy makes the arrows literally rain over the whole town.

And now

And now, the project keeps on expanding. AI scripters joined in to write new AIs to make a match against the computer very challenging for a change. Graphical artists make sure the wonders and new building sets look as if they were made by professionals. Which isn’t that hard for professionals. Composers hop around in their instrumental fantasy to arrange new tunes for the game. Where it will end, god knows, but it’s safe to say we actually came to the point where we are sure that the game will be released. We have the feeling the quality is comparable and maybe even better than The Conquerors, we’re at the point of no return

I like the bridges idea. spies I think are already expensive. the only time I can really get them is either at the end of the game or on a turbo random map.

Hawkwing

I mean spies for one enemy, not the whole map. I thought It might be OP to have it the same price for one enemy, but now I think you are right that it would be too expensive.

And one more thing, how about a maximum market limit? Maybe 100 gold for 350 of another resource?

Reganknight01

u mean when u trade food for gold etc. then yes it does get really high and its almost not worth it. I once had to pay 305+ gold for only 100 stone, wasn’t even worth it so I couldn’t trade for stone cuz I needed my gold for paladins. oh spies for one enemy oooohhhh then that would be way to expensive.

Hawkwing

FYI I posted most of my ideas on the last page, the one on this page was only clarifying unclear areas.

Jaydev

I’m experiencing some map problems.Arabia without sheep and BF without any point to cross over to the enemy.

Hawkwing

For the BF, you can destroy it with onagers

Jaydev

I mean isn’t that a bug in the map?

Hawkwing

I think so. Black Forest does have bugs, I have noticed the pockets they tried to remove are still there, but I have never seen a map where you cannot reach your opponent.

Reganknight01

you can destroy all trees wit onagers or siege onagers, but not mangonels, it was in one of the patches.

TheMaster

Petición: How I can I get in touch with you? I have any ideas that I will like show you.
Thank you for read me, I just want help this fantastic expansion.
-Regards by part of TheMaster

Yan

Hello! You can post your ideas here or at aoczone.net for a public discussion. Also you can send me pm here.

Hawkwing

In a few recent games, I have been noticing a few glitches. They are:
Some techs not being available (happens a lot with spies in multiplayer)

Units walking though gates (the one time I didn’t record, a Computer Slav sent 10 Boyars through my gate an the went on to almost destroy my ally)

The screen randomly jumping around (it will jump to the middle of a forest in the Black Forest map some times)

I am not saying this isn’t a good game, it definintly is, I only am trying to help.

Jaydev

Map glicthes for me.

Hawkwing

One last thing I have thought weird since AOK: Chinese don’t get good gunpowder. They invented it. Plus having a Bombard tower and lacking a cannon seems weird… Bombard towers are just cannons in a tower. I think that should have all gunpowder units (excepting Elite Cannon Galleon) or preferably a bonus like gunpowder available in castle age at half hp and attack (excepting hand cannoneer which could have minus 2 attack and -25% hp. Check this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_of_the_Song_Dynasty#Gunpowder_warfare
It shows Chinese use of gunpowder

Reganknight01

I agree, but, it cant all be historically accurate, otherwise some civs would be overpowered, I think they went for more balance with some historical accuracy, more than complete historical accuracy and no balance.

Fallen

As far as I know, the Chinese never used gunpowder as a weapon until after the Europeans had stolen the recipe for it.

Also, I’ve noticed (in The Conquerors) that the bombard tower isn’t actually a gunpowder unit; it just shoots things that look like cannonballs. It is affected by Chemistry and the blacksmith upgrades.

I’m really excited to play this but I need a new computer first. My current one can barely cope with the standard definition game :'(

Harout

Bridges: Building them, destroying them and upgrading them. You could build a river bridge early on and eventually upgrade it to a toll boot with gates and towers. Also allowing and preventing river traffic would be brilliant.

Tejas4012

I got this game played it and had fun. then i found another game starwars galactic battlegrounds which uses the same game engine that aoe uses. Now I wonder if you guys are able to make and expansion to aoe can you make an expansion for this game too??

Satyaki sil

Just interested-At first you told that the guy from the orient gave you 1 extra civ.Was it the Portuguese?